Sugar in the Blood (40 page)

During this period, Robert Cooper, too, had found new love with a freed woman of colour called Elizabeth Brewster. His relationship with her ran alongside his more established one with Mary Anne. A young and comely widow, Elizabeth had been manumitted some time before emancipation and was therefore part of the freed community that had been battling so intensely for their rights for most of the nineteenth century. She was also a slaveholder. The ownership of slaves by formerly enslaved persons seems shocking, even incomprehensible, to modern sensibilities, but it was a feature of virtually all slave societies despite the attempts of some lawmakers to hinder the practice. The reason was simple: slaves were a valuable form of investment, no different from land or livestock, and freed slaves purchased them as part of their accrual of wealth. (Manumitted persons would often in turn save up to purchase other family members out of slavery.)

Since slaves traditionally did all the menial tasks in slave societies, many affluent freed people of colour were as used to being served by slaves as the white population, and considered them an intrinsic part of their lifestyle. As one declared: “
Many of our children who are now grown almost to the years of maturity have from their earliest infancy been accustomed to be attended by slaves.” No doubt also some saw owning slaves as a status symbol: an affirmation of their distance from their lowly past as slaves themselves, and a mark of their aspiration to equality with the white slave-owning class.

By all indications Robert Cooper’s relationship with Elizabeth was a serious one. He would provide her with her own bit of land, six acres carved out of one of the borders of Burkes. The property was called “Rural Felicity” and had its own dwelling place and provision grounds. Their son, Samuel Brewster Ashby, would in adulthood become a notable campaigner for “coloured” rights.

In 1837 James Thome and Horace Kimball, two North American emissaries of the American anti-slavery movement, hoping to convince their countrymen of the advantages of free labour, toured the West Indies for six months. During their stay in Barbados, they interviewed my great-great-great-great-grandfather, Robert Cooper Ashby. Their account begins: “
We were kindly invited to spend a day at the mansion
of Colonel Ashby, an aged and experienced planter, who is the proprietor of the estate on which he resides.” Taking the “easy and pleasant, nine mile drive from Bridgetown,” they arrived at Burkes, where, after the predictable exchange of pleasantries, the pair discovered something of Robert Cooper’s backstory. In keeping with their wider anti-slavery agenda, Thome and Kimball also quizzed him about the inequities of life under slavery, and he happily confirmed their views: “Colonel A. remarked to us, that he had witnessed many cruelties and enormities under ‘the reign of terror.’ ” He told them that the abolition of slavery had been an incalculable blessing, but added that he had not always entertained the same views respecting emancipation. Before it took place, he was a violent opponent of any measure tending to abolition. He regarded the English abolitionists and the anti-slavery members in Parliament with unmitigated hatred. He had often cursed Wilberforce most bitterly, and thought that no doom, either in this life or in the life to come, was too bad for him. “ ‘But,’ he exclaimed, ‘how mistaken I was about that man—I am convinced of it now—O he was a Good man—a noble philanthropist—if there is a chair in heaven, Wilberforce is in it!’ ”

Colonel Ashby went on to confirm reassuringly “that he found no trouble in managing his apprentices,” stating that “the negroes were not disposed to leave their employment, unless the master was intolerably passionate, and hard with them; as for himself, he did not fear losing a single labourer after 1810.” He was also very emphatic about the idea that the slaves were deserving of their freedom. Whether this was a genuinely held opinion or whether he was simply telling them what they wanted to hear is impossible to ascertain, but they certainly found him very convincing:

As one would expect from any genial host aware of the views of his interlocutors, my ancestor made numerous inquiries respecting slavery in America.

With such sympathetic answers it was no wonder that Thome and Kimball left Barbados believing that the “star of hope was rising on the black and brown community.”

Robert Cooper had every reason to be sanguine about emancipation. In reality, very little in his world had changed. He was still the master of Burkes and his slaves, latterly called “apprentices,” were still effectively his property, tied to his land by the absurd terms of emancipation. Even if they had been legally able to move, they would have had to stay put, not out of enthusiasm for cane cutting but because there was nowhere else to go. Unlike Jamaica and many of the other sugar territories, Barbados was so densely cultivated that there was little opportunity for them to claim their own land. Emancipation had also made Robert Cooper Ashby a very wealthy man, as he was awarded £4,293 12s 5d in compensation, worth around £400,000 in today’s money.

Unsurprisingly apprenticeship, which proved to be slavery by another name, became the new target for the abolitionists, and it was repealed two years early. Thus the real end of slavery came on 1 August 1838.
Throughout the West Indies, slaves were delirious. In Jamaica, a vast crowd of the newly free surrounded a coffin, inscribed “Colonial slavery, died July 31st, 1838, aged 276 years.” On the stroke of midnight the abolitionist missionary William Knibb cried: “
The monster is dead! The negro is free! Three cheers for the queen!” Then the coffin, a chain, handcuffs and an iron collar were buried and, in the soil above them, a tree of liberty was planted.

The initial impact of true emancipation would be felt by oppressor and oppressed alike. For the planters, the thought of living without the institution that was the source of their wealth, power and authority generated profound fear and melancholy, while the newly freed people of Barbados struggled too, despite their exhilaration. For them bondage and oppression were all they had ever known, but now the old ways were dying and new ways were not yet fully born. They were suddenly responsible for organizing their own lives and contemplating the chance of a different destiny for their children as schools for black and coloured children were being planned. And the ex-slaves were now being told that they could look to the authorities, who had so long been their most implacable oppressors, to support them in their goals. The scale of the transition was almost unimaginable and the epic journey from slavery to freedom was only just beginning.

The following year, on 23 October 1839,
The Barbadian
newspaper published a death notice. It read: “
Died on 18th [of this month] at Burke’s Christchurch in his 65th year, Robert Cooper Ashby an old vestryman and many years Colonel of Christ Church Regiment of Militia.” According to family lore, Robert Cooper passed away on a wooden lounge chair on the veranda of the plantation. That evening the family would have gathered for his last night above ground. Robert Henry, the eldest of his children with Mary Anne, would have been in charge: allowing the visitors to say goodbye to the body, and explaining to the younger ones what had happened. Among the friends and family were some ex-slaves who must have felt profoundly ambivalent about the passing of the man who had dictated their lives for so many years.

Robert Cooper’s funeral was a grand event. As had been the custom
since the early days of slavery, dozens of his ex-slaves, all dressed in black, walked before the coffin; it was followed by a long cavalcade of at least three dozen carriages carrying his militia comrades, relatives and fellow planters. On arrival at Christ Church parish church, the mourners organized themselves without prompting according to their status: the “widow” Mary Anne and acknowledged family at the very front, then local dignitaries, vestrymen and planters. In the first of the “coloured pews” were people like John Stephen and his wife, whom all present recognized had a special relationship with the deceased, as well as other skilled or favoured workers. Behind them sat the scores of black and brown labourers who had sown and harvested his sugar cane, maintained his house and cooked his food.

Before the service, the mourners paid their last respects and the lid was closed. It is possible that John Stephen, as one of the plantation’s carpenters, might have made the coffin. But whoever constructed it, it was undoubtedly a handsome casket made of the most precious wood and finished with beautifully crafted fixtures and carefully detailed decorations. The pallbearers, dominated by Robert Cooper’s sons, loaded his body onto the horse-drawn carriage and transported it to the cemetery. There Robert Cooper’s body was interred in a large, white—but unnamed—tomb that adjoins the church on its eastern side. His descendants still squabble about who has the right to be buried there alongside him.

In death, as in life, Robert Cooper’s timing was good. He was a product of the licentious Georgian era, who died just as the puritanical Victorian age was establishing itself. His was a milieu that was running out of time. The heyday of sugar had passed, although the plantations and the particular lifestyle associated with them would endure well into the twentieth century. The dominance of West Indian cane was already being threatened by the production of that commodity in other territories in the east. The reign of “King Sugar” would soon be over, conquered by the ascent of sugar beet.

Whether white or black, ex-slave or always free, those who attended his funeral were witness to a critical moment in their own lives and that of the plantation. With “the Colonel” gone, the past was silenced, and now the seductive calls of the future could be heard more unmistakably and more vehemently.

Documented on seven pages of yellowing oilskin paper,
Robert Cooper Ashby’s last will and testament is still available to view in the Barbados Archives. Though the sense of what Robert Cooper is trying to convey is strangled somewhat by the repetitive legalese typical of such official documents, it nonetheless provides a vivid picture of his emotional priorities at the time it was written. After the traditional direction that his funeral expenses be “fully paid and satisfied,” Robert Cooper immediately turned his attention to settling the future of his youngest child, Samuel Ashby, the offspring of his most recent liaison with Elizabeth Brewster, bequeathing the baby the house “Rural Felicity” and the surrounding six acres of land on which they already lived. In addition, he left to the child six apprentice labourers, Charlotte, Greta, Robert, James, Edward and Georgiana, “for and during the unexpired term of their apprenticeships.” Their labour and the yield from the land were to be put towards maintaining young Samuel until his majority. In the event of his premature decease, however, the property was to be transferred to his mother, Elizabeth Brewster, and “her heirs forever.”

Only after safeguarding his new concubine and their young baby does Robert Cooper turn his attention to his more established family. He bequeaths to Mary Anne and her children the “remainder or balance of my said plantation,” Burkes. For the first five years the plantation was to be kept intact and the funds, “Crops, Produce and Profits,” were to be devoted primarily towards “the maintenance and support of his youngest children,” Elizabeth Mary Ashby, Arabella Ann Ashby, William Armstrong Ashby, Caroline Kezar Ashby, Alexander Lindsay Ashby and John George Ashby, until they reached the age of twenty-one, with a slightly smaller proportion of the plantation’s yields going to supporting his partner Mary Anne and their eldest children, Robert Henry and Alice Christian. Five years after his death, the property was to be sold and, profits divided and passed on to Mary Anne and her children. In a codicil to the will, he instructs his executors to sell and dispose of his plantation Brittons “for the benefit of the above children.”